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DiManno: Toronto’s choke-out for smokers escalates

Only nicotine-enthusiasts are bludgeoned with blame, threatened to be stripped of health insurance coverage, subjected to moral shunning, writes Star columnist Rosie DiManno.

Star columnist and avid smoker Rosie DiManno weighs in on the issue of expanding the no-smoking laws to include commercial patios, sidewalks, public squares and TTC shelters in Toronto. (Oct. 22, 2012) (TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

If you don’t like the sight of butt litter, how about just making an ash can available? But no, that would be too simple, writes Star colummist Rosie DiManno. (Oct. 17, 2012)
(SRDJAN ZIVULOVIC / REUTERS)

First they came for the restaurant smoking sections and you didn’t give a rat’s ass.

Then they came for the separately ventilated smoke rooms and you didn’t give a rat’s ass.

Then they came for the partly enclosed bar patios and you didn’t give a rat’s ass.

Now they want just about all the great outdoors: commercial patios, sidewalks, public squares and TTC shelters. (So much for the rule of thumb — fire up a cigarette and the bus will come.)

Oh, they’ll have public consultations on extending the choke-out for smokers, the public health board promised last week. But that won’t count for licorice curls, as board chief John Filion has presumptively decided. No matter what feedback the board gets on proposals to expand Toronto’s anti-smoking bylaw, they’ll plow ahead because consultation is a legal requirement, no more than a fingers-in-the-ears non-listening-to-you window-dressing exercise.

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Anybody who has paid the slightest attention to Nico-Nazi tactics over the past three decades knows how this works — drip-drip-drip of civil rights abrogated, in the name of a higher purpose; a kind of mental waterboarding for the shameless who continue to smoke.

Which, according to no less an authority than Dr. David McKeown, medical director of health for Toronto, comprises some 20 per cent of the city’s population over the age of 20, a honking huge constituency to so seriously inconvenience, ignore and steamroller, on the grounds of what’s good for you and more to the point good for them, the anti-smoke purists, pink and pristine of lung and virtuous of mind.

The no-smoking diktat around city playgrounds and children’s splash pads from 2009 just made me roll my eyes. I guess this might have affected the Filipino nannies minding your kids, if they happened to be smokers. Didn’t matter one iota to any of the puffers I knew, accustomed by now to absorbing glares of disapproval if they ever dare to light up a dart in the vicinity of youngsters, including their own. Zealots have no off-switch.

Anyway, that’s 20 per cent of the population who — to hear ban-the-smoke Cassandras tell it — will die gasping for air, hooked up to oxygen tanks and ventilators, with exhaled smoke spewing out of their tracheotomy hole. Well, actually these respiratory ravages can and do inflict all sorts of folks, non-smokers included, but only nicotine-enthusiasts are bludgeoned with blame, threatened to be stripped of health insurance coverage, subjected to moral shunning.

Worry not, however, about the wretched end-game part of life and all its depravities. It’s not just those patients tethered to IV lines, sitting in wheelchairs parked outside hospitals, enjoying their tobacco fix, and old people shivering in the cold behind their assisted living facilities who will soon enough be considered expendable. Once the death merchants — assisted suicide propagandists — get their legislative way, the fragile and burdensome will be made to shuffle off alongside smokers to the colony of the unwanted, there to await lethal dispatch.

Filion, McKeown and their like-minded anti-smoking absolutists have zero tolerance for, say, restaurant owners who object to more stringent rules, just as they had no intention of holding the uh-uh line when those same proprietors spent thousands of dollars to build semi-enclosed smoking patios which were declared illegal shortly after the money had been spent. Give them an inch — I warned you — and they will always take a mile. Now they want it all, every patch of shared space, every niche of smoking sanctuary.

“There is very broad public support for going further than we have,’’ Filion declared.

Public surveys purportedly back up this claim. Public surveys also regularly show the majority of Canadians would like to see a return to the death penalty, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Maybe just for smokers?

No-smoking signs are posted throughout the city, claiming up to nine metres of smoke-free designated space beyond all sorts of places. These warnings aren’t worth the cardboard they’re written on. At this juncture, the bylaw applies only to hospitals and other medical facilities. So you can tell property managers and security guards to blow it out their arse. But smokers have become so battered they usually meekly obey.

If you don’t like the sight of butt litter, how about just making an ash can available? No, that would be too simple, too enabling. Besides, nine metres would most often put smokers in the middle of traffic, which is where the militants want you, preferably to be flattened by a passing streetcar.

You know, while on vacation in France for a month this summer, I actually forgot to smoke. Possibly I wasn’t drinking enough because, for me, the two go hand in hand. And I wasn’t writing, which was the major difference, when I instinctively reach for a cigarette. That explains why I no longer work in the office but my job allows for that. In other circumstances — at the Air Canada Centre, for example, on deadline after a hockey game (remember hockey?) — I simply ignore the bylaw and defy colleagues to get in my face about it. This makes me a scofflaw. Yes, I scoff at the law. And sometimes — as at my hotel during the London Olympics — I get dinged with a hefty fine, which I suck up.

You may not care for smokers or give a flying fig about the proscriptions imposed on our “foul’’ habit. You may be entirely undisturbed about apartheid for puffers. You may turn up your nose at my contention that the smoking laws represent class war by other means, disproportionately penalizing “white trash” — God forbid that expression be used — whose only recreational pleasure is a fag and a pint.

And I won’t give a damn. Of course, I might be dead. It will be a smoking funeral.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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